Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday June 03, 2010 @12:10PM
from the no-centaurs-allowed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The sci-fi movie Splice seems to have scared the Ohio's State Senator Steve Buehrer. The Ohio Senate has passed Sen. Buehrer's bill banning 'the creation, transportation, or receipt of a human-animal hybrid, the transfer of a nonhuman embryo into a human womb, and the transfer of a human embryo into a nonhuman womb.' So much for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday September 09, 2009 @12:59PM
from the 50-watt-shampoo dept.

Renoise writes "Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world's energy needs. A solar panel made from human hair. The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power. The solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US (£23) to make from raw materials. Gentlemen, start your beards. The future of hair farming is here!"

Riley Munoz writes: "Hey Slashdot,
Our balmy friend, Jack Thompson, continues his "heroic" crusade against violent video games by attacking Wendy's upcoming kids meal promotion for the Nintendo Wii version of Manhunt 2. Game Almighty received a copy of the letter today written by Thompson to the CEO of Wendy's pleading for the promotion to be cancelled.
Sample paragraph:
"A dear friend of mine worked for Wendy's and with Dave Thomas closely for years. From that I know that Dave Thomas never would have tolerated the use of Wendy's good name to promote Nintendo's Wii, not with this game available on the Wii platform. "
http://www.gamealmighty.com/story-individual/story /Jack_Thompson_Targets_Wendys_Due_to_Wii_Promotion /
Thanks for any links!
Riley Munoz
-Community Manager
riley@gamealmighty.com
www.GameAlmighty.com"

Byte Swapper writes: "After all the fuss over the AACS LA's trying to censor a certain 128-bit number that still has something like two million hits on Google, the Freedom to Tinker folks would like to point out that you too can own your own integer. They've set up a script that will generate a random number, encrypt a copyrighted haiku, and then deed the number back to you. You won't get a copyright on the number or the haiku, but you can turn almost any number you want into an illegal circumvention device under the DMCA, such that anyone subject to US law caught distributing it can be punished under the DMCA's anti-trafficking section, for which the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions do not apply. So F9090211749D5BE341D8C5565663C088 is truly mine now, and you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands!"

homeward_bound writes: In an odd article, CNET tells us what your choice of MP3 encoding quality says about you, and describes the typical traits of digital music lovers from the childish Limewire freaks to the middle-aged audiophile fanatics, and includes the notion that most people with 128kbps MP3's in their libraries are music pirates.

Lauren Weinstein writes: "CBS has chosen to block Web comments about Senator Barack Obama — and only him, they're reportedly not blocking comments regarding other candidates — due to the volume of racial and other ugly remarks in an apparently unmoderated forum... http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000232.html — Lauren —"

An anonymous reader writes: Telnet was replaced by SSH for obvious reasons. Why hasn't standard email been replaced? There are more problems associated with standard email than there were with using services like Telnet, yet we managed to sweepingly switch out Telnet for SSH. Why not dump standard email for a better messaging implementation? We could cure SPAM and privacy issues in one fell swoop.

simoniker writes: What do game designers need to know about statistics? Age Of Empires DS designer Tyler Sigman focuses on "a few select statistical topics that I believe should be understood by game designers" in a new article, discussing: "In the game I just finished, we recorded data from play sessions and then set challenge levels in the game based upon the mean and standard deviation values from those recorded data. We set Medium difficulty to be equal to the mean values, Easy difficulty to be equal to the mean minus a certain amount of standard deviations, and then Hard difficulty equal to the mean plus a certain amount of standard deviations." Would all games be better if they were tuned mathematically?

John Pallato is steamed about the January security update for Windows, finding IE 7 slipped in to the autoupdate-channeled patch. IE 7 broke his Internet access due to compatibility issues as deftly as any malware. In his own words:

scvff writes: Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Bartlesville, Oklahoma is auctioning off one years tuition on Ebay. Seriously. Starting February 4, 2007 OWU is opening an Auction on Ebay for tuition, room and board for an academic year at OWU. The winner receives tuition, room, board and applicable fees for next fall and spring at OWU. The winner may take up to 17 credit hours each semester.
The person who will attend OWU must meet all admissions standards and apply for all available grants and scholarships. This auction is for tuition, room, and board in the traditional undergraduate program.
University Webpage: http://www.okwu.edu/
More Information about the auction: http://community.gospelcom.net/Brix?pageID=20676

bednarz writes: "Google's general manager of enterprise business Tuesday said a "crisis" in IT is preventing enterprises from pursuing the type of innovations that allow businesses to grow. From the article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-googl e-apps.html
"The way Google built what is on the order of a $10 billion business in eight years was through some pretty amazing innovation," said Girouard, who is also a vice president at Google. "CIOs in particular are really in a difficult situation, and innovation isn't something they can spend the majority of their waking hours talking about. The information technology business as it pertains to large businesses has become a lot of maintenance.""

sudden.zero writes: "After spending years apart, Sun Microsystems and Intel have agreed to team up.
In an announcement just a day before it's due to release it latest quarterly results, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told an audience in San Francisco on Jan. 22 that his company would produce new Xeon-based x86 servers and workstation by later in 2007.
In turn, Intel announced that it would now support Sun's Solaris operating system and would encourage ISVs (independent software providers) to support Solaris on Xeon platforms, thus giving Sun access to a much broader audience. The agreement also means that Intel will also support open-source communities from Sun, including OpenSolaris, open Java and NetBeans.
While the benefits to a collaborative effort between Sun and Intel are obvious, the agreement is also seen as a blow to Advanced Micro Devices, which had been an exclusive provider of x86 server processors — Opteron — to Sun for the past several years. The agreement now also places Sun on the same playing field as other top x86 server providers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, which offer both AMD and Intel processors in their respective server products.
This makes the deal between Intel and Sun a win-win deal for both companies, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H.
see the full story here"

An anonymous reader writes: In a decision to dismiss the case against the Dept of Justice and FBI, appeals court suggests that FBI may have violated the First Amendment when attempting to remove Y2K Hoax film way back in 1999